Uttar Pradesh Vidhaan Sabha, India’s largest state assembly, is to become the first state legislature in the country to embrace digitization of the proceedings of the State Legislature.
SemanticBits, a Hyderabad-based company, partnered with Persistent as part of a consortium for implementing the initiative, Persistent said.
The companies will scan, annotate and index books of proceedings stored in a secure and tamper proof digital vault, and make them available on the portal accessible from any device.
The solution allows searches in English, Hindi and other official Indian languages.
The “solution replaces the traditional and time consuming practice of manual or physical searches and retrievals, Time to information is now reduced from days, weeks or even months to mere seconds,” said, Anand Deshpande, Persistent Systems founder and CEO.
The Indian Parliament has already implemented similar digitization solutions, and provides access to most of its documents and books via the Internet. State legislatures tend to be behind the curve on digitization due to various factors, including a lack of suitable software for searching and indexing non-English language content.
“It also allows users to look for information and to collate the information, reducing the time and effort taken to compile research reports and improving the accuracy and thoroughness of information.
“This allows research officers to handle more requests with improved efficiency and more qualitative discussions happening in the legislative assembly,” Anand said.
Multilingual Intelligent Search and Analytics solution extends access and reach within the Government departments of the State legislatures, and also to the general public.